I think this Indie Author Weekly Update is the longest one I’ve ever compiled. Rachel Thompson’s NaNoProNo is in full swing and I like to bring the best of those posts to my weekly roundup. Anne R. Allen wrote a dynamite piece of the author persona. I start with the most important post: the one on MailChimp by David Gaughran. Read it. Enjoy all the posts in this week’s edition.

MailChimp

Time To Ditch Mailchimp? by David Gaughran: “Mailchimp attracted extreme criticism this week when it became clear how its new marketing services would impact its core email offering — particularly in terms of pricing — leading many long-time users to start explore alternatives (including this one).”

How to Make Your Book Marketing Plan a Success by guest Maureen Joyce Connolly and from Rachel Thompson: The very core of my approach was to learn as much about launching a book as quickly as possible, to compile a strategy and to execute it with support if I needed, but for me to be the driver of my plan. I also understood instinctively, that I would need to identify my personal strengths and use them to my advantage since I had no social media presence – nada, zip – as my business had flourished via referrals.

This Is How to Use Harder Working Links to Sell More Books by Guest Jessie Lakes and from Rachel Thompson: “Let me quickly introduce you to what we call “intelligent links,” the hardest working links on the internet. These aren’t the links you copy out of your browser window or a shortened bit.ly links, but rather supercharged links that can help you sell more books and unlock a new stream of revenue. And the best part is that you are already doing the hard and time-consuming work, swapping in the use of “intelligent links” doesn’t take much extra time at all.

This Is How to Sell Your Book in 20 Seconds by Guest Sharon Goldinger and from Rachel Thompson: “Picture this: You’re in an elevator, your book cupped in your hand, the title clearly visible to the other person in the elevator. While riding from floor 1 to floor 19, she asks, “What is From Fat to Fit about? You respond: “You’ll be inspired by the amazing Community Meltdown, which motivated 1,000 people to have fun while losing 8,000 pounds in 8 weeks, and my personal story as I went from fat to fit and lost 62 pounds.”When the elevator lands at her stop, she says, “Sounds great. I’ve got to get a copy.”

Book Readings

How to Plan a Book Reading That Delights Your Audience from Jane Friedman and by James Navé: “The audience is on your side. They love writing just as you do; that’s why they’re there. These wonderful people have taken time out of their lives, probably traveled some distance and spent some money, just to hear you read. They’ve come to witness your imagination at work. They’ve come to be moved, entertained, motivated, validated, informed, provoked, stimulated and inspired. In short, they’re receptive.”

Once we set up our social media profiles and pages, we get so absorbed or even harried about keeping up with our postings that we forget to review our:

avatars

banner images

bios

overall review of our updates

return on investment (ROI)

So, let’s talk about these items.

Steps to Improving Your Social Media Presence

Social Media Avatars

When was the last time you updated your avatar?

If you took a selfie in the past or had a friend snap a picture of you, it’s time for you to hire a professional to take some shots of you.

While she’s at it, have her take a picture of you writing and reading. And in other poses as well. You can use these additional shots on the back of your book.

Remember, an avatar needs to be a close-up shot of your head. Don’t wear sunglasses or hats when you take this picture. They will obstruct an image of your beautiful self and won’t let your readers see you clearly.

Banners Are Critical to Your Social Media Presence

Don’t ignore social media banners (header on Twitter) and just put up anything. Use Canva.com to create your banners or use a graphic artist at Fiverr.

I don’t recommend that you fall for the $5 deals. Spend some money and pay at least $30 per image.

Keep in mind that your banners needn’t be static. On Facebook, for example, it’s a good idea to change the images quarterly.

I know that Joanna will change her Twitter headers when she runs a promotion or when she launches a new book.

My header image above is for the two books I market the most, especially Social Media Just for Writers. In reality, it’s time for me to create a new header and new banner images for the rest of my social media. I’ve used this version for quite some time, so this post is a good reminder for myself. 😎

Is Your Social Media Bio Still Current?

When was the last time you revised your bio? Keep in mind your bios need to be identical on all social media platforms. That rule applies to avatars and banners as well.

I haven’t changed my bio in a while, but I’m still happy with it. It includes my mission for authors, describes what I do, and most importantly, it has a call to action to sign up for my email course.

Your bio should also include a call to action to sign up for your email list in your bio.

Did you write a new book? Your bio should include its title. Are you offering a new freebie? Pitch that in your bio.

I like British thriller author, Mark Dawson’s bio:

The author of the John Milton and Soho Noir series. For free copy of my best-selling novel THE BLACK MILE join my list at http://eepurl.com/Cai5X

Go to Twitter and Facebook, search for your favorite authors or writers you admire, and review their bios. Then mimic the best ones.

Review Your Social Media Updates

Now it’s time to scrutinize your social media posts.

Does every tweet have an image? Do you always add pictures to your Facebook updates? Images increase engagement so don’t even think about posting anything online without adding an image or video.

Next, how often do you post updates? On your Facebook page, it’s ideal to post updates twice a day. At least, post once daily.

On Twitter, I post at least seven times daily. I suggest you at least tweet five times daily. Remember, don’t use those tweets to talk about yourself. Promote the books of your colleagues and your followers’ tweets.

Which Pinterest accounts do you follow? I tend to follow accounts that fall within my interests.

For example, I love to collect images of bookstores, bookshelves, and libraries, so I follow people who have similar boards. But I also like to follow other authors.

I’ve also been thinking about Pinterest a lot lately because it’s been so long since I’ve written a post devoted to this search engine.

In the beginning, I loved to escape to this network to build my boards and find eye-catching images.

These days, I use Pinterest more seriously. I use it almost exclusively to pin images from my blog as well as the author quotes I post on Fridays.

Pinterest is a powerful referral source so while you can just use it for fun, don’t forget that you should also use it to post images from your blog posts, create boards around the books you’ve published, and create boards on future books.

I thought we could explore together how other authors and writing-related organizations use Pinterest by examining their boards below.

Pinterest Accounts – Authors

It’s no surprise that author, blogger, and book designer Joel Friedlander’s boards focus primarily on images from his blog, and about book covers, the templates he sells, the books he’s written, and book production. His account receives 64,600 monthly viewers.

Author, publishing consultant, and conference speaker Jane Friedman has thirteen boards. She pins images about getting published, book marketing, digital tools, and Amazon and the publishing industry. She has 3,000 followers and has 24,800 monthly viewers.

Rachel Thompson is an author and marketer who writes about book marketing as well as her experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse. She started NaNoProMo to help authors who participate in NaNoWriMo market their books. She has boards on great blog posts, 30-day book marketing strategies, and PTSD. She has 6,000 followers and has 17,000 monthly viewers.

Pinterest Accounts – Services for Authors

Author and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Penny Sansevieri’s account naturally focuses on book marketing, blogging and internet tips, writer inspiration, and dog love. She also has a board devoted to 52 Ways to Sell More Books, which is the title of one of her books. She enjoys 25,000 monthly viewers.

Jordan Rosenfeld is a California-based author and editor. She has numerous boards, and they include Books & Stories I’ve Written, Write Path Retreats, and Book Cover – WriteFree. Her Yummy Foods includes a picture of an Old Book Cake. She has 328 followers

When was the last time you changed your password on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest?

When was the last time you updated your profile on Instagram or checked the about section on your Facebook page?

Once we set up our social media profiles and pages, we tend to neglect them.

We instead turn our focus to finding content to post and schedule every day.

Before the New Year rolls in, take time to spiff up your profiles and change your passwords. Yes, you should periodically change your passwords to ward off hackers.

How to Create Hacker-Proof Passwords

I was listening to NPR one day and heard a program about how to create hacker-proof passwords.

Here’s the formula. Think of your two favorite authors or leaders. Let’s use Hemingway and Faulkner in this example.

Use the first few (or last) letters of their names, stick a numeral sequence in the middle, and add one or more characters.

For example, you could create the following passwords:

Hem357Fau*&

Way731Ner*^

Ing259Ulk%@

Or, you can use a program called 1Password https://1password.com. The application devises a hacker-proof password for each of your social media networks. Then when it’s time to open Facebook, 1Password applies the appropriate password.

This program costs just $3.99 a month. What a deal.

Basic Rules About Passwords

Here are some of my most basic rules for passwords.

Do you use the same password for multiple social media accounts? Don’t. Create separate passwords for every social media network you use and every application you try. I know this can be a hassle but if you use the same password across the web think about how easy it will for a hacker to get into all of your accounts.

Keep your passwords in a safe place. Do not keep them on sheets of paper and do not keep them on e-files labeled passwords. Consider keeping them on an online program such as 1Password.com. https://1password.com

Share your passwords with as few people as possible and only if you have to, such as a virtual assistant.

Use a complicated password with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.

Never use the word “password” or the numbers 123 for your online programs or ATM cards.

How to Update Your Social Media

Update Your Facebook Page

Go to the About section on your Facebook page and make sure that everything is current.

If you have 35 or more likes on your page, review your analytics. What are the circumstances that trigger engagement on your page? Does it occur with certain types of posts, images or specific times of the day?

Do you know whether more men or women like your page? Do you know their ages? Check out this section and start planning an editorial calendar for the first three months of 2019.

Review Your Twitter Account

First, look at your following and follower numbers and use a program such as ManageFlitter to fine-tune the balance. I use ManageFlitter to unfollow some users who don’t follow back, to whitelist users I never want to unfollow and to block users who have fake accounts as well as spam and bot accounts. I also unfollow inactive accounts.

There are two Twitter follow limits. If you have fewer than 5,000 followers, the maximum people you can follow are 5,000. (The old limit was 2,000 followers.)

So, if 5,000 follow you, the maximum number of people you can follow is 5,500. So be sure to use Tweepi or ManageFlitter to start unfollowing users who don’t follow you back.

Tips to Improve Your Social Media Updates

There are many ways you can boost engagement and feel better about your social media updates.

Shall we get into the meat of this discussion? Let’s!

Here’s my list of tips to increase engagement on all of your social media posts.

Always post images. Always. It’s easy to do on Instagram and Pinterest because, obviously, if you don’t have a picture to post, you don’t have anything to post. So I’m talking about all of the other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. We can reverse the order of this tip and put it this way: never post anything on social media without including an image or a video. According to CoSchedule, images increase retweets by 150%, and according to KISSMetrics, Facebook photos attract 53% more Likes and 84% more click-through rates than text posts. Besides, Facebook makes it easy to turn a text post into an image post with its array of color backgrounds for your status updates.

Share quick tips with your followers and fans. Remember that Facebook posts limited to 80 or fewer characters receive 65% more engagement. Yeah, this is another example of when less is more.

Ask questions. If you go to a party and ask questions, people will love you, right? The same dynamic works on social media.

Comment on current events such as Warriors basketball season starting 8-), updates from the World Series, or any issue that is fun and not too controversial. They can even be personalized. Did you take a hike last weekend or win a race? Post images.

Post humorous memes. People love these.

Give away a free eBook for the best photo caption to a funny or ambiguous image.

Share a thought or image that moves you.

Get personal. I tend to like to not be too personal online. It has to do with my comfort level. But the few times that I am less private, engagement soars. So, self-reflect before your self-reveal and then decide if you’re comfortable being more personal and opening up more often. People want to get to know the author behind the books they read.

Share a photo from your past and post in on Thursday with the hashtag #ThrowbackThursday. Author Mark Dawson does this all the time on Facebook.

Buffer reported that to make a tweet more popular, focus on length, nouns and verbs. Don’t focus on mentions or hashtags. Also, use positive words and use an indefinite article such as A or An.

Use emoticons. People love these, and they aren’t going away. I use them sparingly in my business-related emails, but I do use them.

Don’t over-promote yourself. Let’s return to the party analogy I mentioned earlier. Nobody — and I mean not a single person — likes the guy who only talks about himself. It’s a turnoff, right? What you need to realize is that marketing isn’t about your or your books or your blog posts, or your courses. It’s about the benefit. What benefit do readers derive from your books? Even when you focus on the benefit, you still have to do your marketing sparingly. Promote other authors. Promote your readers. Share or retweet what they post. Leave comments on their updates. Marketing is never about you. Sure, you want to sell books, but you won’t get sales by over-promoting yourself. You’ll get sales if you promote other authors, do things for your readers, learn about your readers, answer their questions, and ask them questions. Got it?

Develop content aligned with your marketing objectives. Otherwise, you’ll just be guessing in your marketing and never know for certain what to post.

Run polls and surveys. That’s right, ask your fans and followers what they want to read by your on your blog and in your books, and what they prefer to see on your social media profiles.

Engage in conversations. You can ask questions, and you need to answer questions when readers ask questions. Look at your news feeds and take time to share, retweet, and leave comments.

Sharing images is the first step, making sure that they are correctly sized is the next. Don’t use an image designed for a Twitter post on Facebook and vice versa. Resize images according to the platform’s preferred image dimensions.

As best as you can, make sure that all of your images are the best they can be. Never settle for boring.

Everyone loves a smile, right? Well, it turns out that on Pinterest smiling faces get more saves.

Leverage popular phrases or slogans. During the World Cup a few years ago, “because of fútbol” was a favorite phrase. On Twitter, Monday Motivation and Wednesday Wisdom are hashtags that are always used on those days. These sayings can surface suddenly and be time-limited in their popularity. Use them while they’re hot.

Be consistent in your blog images. Always use the same size for the image at the top of your blog post and use the same fonts.

It’s Friday, which means that it’s time for a new Indie Authors Weekly Update. Be sure to read Mark Dawson’s post on building a successful author career. Anne R. Allen and David Kudler’s posts are also great.

5 Steps to Building a Successful Author Career by Mark Dawson: “I’ll probably say it again before I have finished, but I’d argue that this is the best time in the history of the world to be a writer. I know – pretty grandiose. Let me explain. When I started writing at the end of the 1990s, if I wanted to get my writing out to readers I only really had one path that was open to me. Once I had finished my manuscript, I would send the first three chapters and a covering letter to one of the dozens of literary agencies that accepted unsolicited submissions.”

9 Pieces of Bad Publishing Advice New Writers Should Ignore by Anne R. Allen: “Social Media is both a boon and a curse to new writers. Online writing groups and forums are an excellent source of insider information on the publishing industry—stuff we once could only find at expensive classes and writers’ conferences. But social media is also a major source of misinformation and dangerously bad advice.”

Retweeting Your Own Tweets Can Boost Your Reach and Engagement from Buffer: “In February 2018, Twitter updated its rules to prohibit sharing tweets that are identical or substantially similar to one another. Before this rule change, re-sharing top tweets (sparingly) was one of our favorite strategies for increasing our Twitter reach and engagement here at Buffer. And while it was a shame to forgo this strategy, we understand the rationale behind the new rules and are fully supportive of them. So, rather than dwelling on what used to work, we started searching for other strategies to try. Here’s one experiment we’ve been working on (and our results in full).”

Amazon Top Reviewer Secrets: The Must-Read Tell-All by Penny Sansevieri: “When you’re pitching Amazon Top Reviewers, have you ever wondered about the things they love, and the things that will absolutely get you shoved to the bottom of their book review consideration pile? We thought so, too, which is why we took some time to interview several of these top book reviewers. Each of them is anonymous in this piece (with the exception of one).”

Words Gone Wild: KDP Keywords Revisited from TheBookDesigner.com and by David Kudler: “I’ve talked about keywords before; they’re an essential piece of metadata that determines how easy it is for the right reader to find your book. They are in many ways the key to discoverability. It is best to think of them, not as single words, but as search phrases — that is to say, groups of words that your ideal reader is likely to search for. Put a different way, what question is your ideal reader likely to ask to which your book is the answer?”

I’ve written a lot about Pinterest for writers in the past, but it’s been a while since I wrote anything new about this platform.

So let’s take a look at what’s new and significant about the changes that are taking place on this channel.

The profile is new and includes a cover image. You can select from some different options for your cover image, such as your latest pins, recent pins from your site, or a specific board.

To select your board image, click the pencil in the upper right-hand corner and make your selection from the list.

Another change is that Pinterest no longer keeps track of follower counts. While follower counts are big on Twitter and other platforms, Pinterest chose to focus more on monthly viewers. Personally, I like that tally better. And that number is situated right next to your profile picture.

But if you really want to know how many followers you have, click “followers” on the tab beneath your profile picture, also known as your avatar.

See, wouldn’t you rather know your monthly viewers than your follower count? I think that monthly viewers are a better number to track.

Next up, is that if you select “following” from the upper taskbar, you’ll see pins (aka images) from the people you’re following. So instead of just going to the general newsfeed, you can now check out what your followers are saving to their pinboards and uploading.

This year, Pinterest changed its algorithm. Now, Pinterest prioritizes content that people you follow are engaging with.

Hashtags were introduced some time ago but in a new move – perhaps to mimic Instagram? – Pinterest is now recommending that you use up to 20 hashtags. Remember, on Instagram, you can use up to 30.

With this new move, hashtags will are now more critical regarding finding content.

Something else that’s new is that group boards are less important for engagement. I’ve never been a fan of group boards, except between authors and readers, so I’m not particularly sad about this move.

5 Pinterest Tips That Are Important to Remember

Check out this list of tips you need to know to do well on Pinterest.

Pinterest board titles and keywords are essential so relent with the fun and unusual pinboard titles and go for those that will improve your SEO on this platform.

Make sure you remember to pin images from your website, in particular, your blog. Pinterest is fantastic at referral traffic so take advantage of this aspect of this browser/social media channel.

You have a business account, right? If not, get one right now! Pinterest business accounts offer free analytics, and you get the opportunity to validate your website, which improves your SEO.

Design your images for Pinterest. Twitter and Facebook images are too small for this platform.

Just like other social media platforms, use Pinterest regularly. Don’t use it one day and then skip a month or two weeks. Save images here on a regular basis.

Welcome to this week’s Indie Author Update. Check out the link to Reedsy’s new book title generator below as well as SoftPress Pubishing’s post on how to building a following on the powerful Pinterest platform.

Don’t forget that I offer a social media audit for authors that analyzes what you’re doing well on social media and what can improve. You can find out more about the service here.

Author’s Guide to Building a Following on Pinterest from SoftPress Publishing: “If you’ve ever used Pinterest, you know it is a very eclectic collection of images on virtually every topic under the sun. But, at its core, Pinterest is much more than that. It’s a very powerful search engine (think Google) where users can find information on whatever they desire to learn about. With over 175 million monthly users and over 50 billion pins, Pinterest is a driving force in the social media world. And, you can use the power of Pinterest to build your author brand. But how?

12 Simple Tricks To Increase Your Email Open Rates from the Blogging Wizard: “Have your email open rates suddenly plummeted without warning? Maybe your email list is new, and you haven’t had a chance to grow your list or improve your open rates? You’ve spent hours crafting the perfect email. Tailored specifically for your audience. With the right amount of eye-catching visuals and captivating copy. Your email even solved a massive problem for your readers.”

You self-published your book (whew!), offered your book for presale, celebrated your launch with champagne, and sold books to everyone you know.

Perhaps you’re even blogging regularly.

Reaching out to the press, contacting book clubs, and reading at bookstores are great ways to promote your book offline. But to reach potential readers across the U.S. and around the world, you need to use social media.

Are you silently screaming, “Argh!” You’re not alone.

Like other writers, you want to get going on your next book and spending time in front of the computer posting on social media, pinning images to Pinterest, or snapping photos for Instagram may seem, well, like a bit of a waste of time.

The thought of creating a social media presence can seem overwhelming to indie authors, but it doesn’t have to be. All you need are 30 minutes a day (really!) and these tips.

10 Social Media Tips Every Author Needs to Know

Decide who your intended audience is and use the social media networks that your readers are most likely to use. For example, if you write young adult fiction, you’ll want to have a presence on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. If your readers are primarily women, create accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. When you wrote your book, you had your readers in mind, right? Now think about that reader and where he or she is most likely to hang out online. Knowing where your audience likes to hang out online will save you time. Long gone are the days when social media experts touted the wisdom of being everywhere. It’s impossible to be on every social media network, too time-consuming, and quite frankly, a waste of your precious time. For more information on where to find your reader demographics online, turn to Pew Research Center.

With more than 2 billion people now using Facebook, it’s hard to ignore this social media behemoth. Creating a profile (profiles are for people, and pages are for products, books, authors, businesses, and services) on Facebook is your first step. I always used to recommend that authors have a Facebook page as well. In the old days – say about six years ago – 36% of your fans would see what you posted on your Facebook author page. These days, that percentage is down to 1%. What’s an author to do? You can still have a Facebook author page, but you need to understand that you’ll need to learn and spending money on Facebook advertising. The other option for you is to create a Facebook Group. To learn about how to start and grow a Facebook Group, read this post I wrote for TheBookDesigner.com.

Allocate 30 minutes a day to your social media marketing. In the mornings, spend 15 minutes curating information for your social media posts by scanning your friends and followers’ posts and using one or more of these websites and resources:

Feeling like you’re in the same situation? No worries. Just keep reading.

You may remember the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the time, you promote your colleagues, other writers, and great posts, and 10 percent of the time, you can promote your books, blog posts, readings, and awards.

If you’re still feeling confused about how to best present the information you’ve curated, don’t worry. Keep reading and you’ll learn how to write the best social media updates.

Tweets Can Have 280 Characters

For about the past year, the character limit on Twitter has been 280, up for 140. However, it’s still best to keep your tweets to 100 characters if possible. Doing so, will increase your retweets according to SproutSocial.

Here are a variety of sample tweets from the indie author/publishing world:

You’re probably wondering what you as an author could say. Here are some additional examples that cover an array of genres. All you need to add to these tweets is a URL. If you are promoting a colleague, then add a URL and a Twitter username.

Love #Spain? Read this novel based in #Sevilla + link + name of the book

The first tweet is a sample tweet from an author about his or her book. The second tweet would theoretically be for a writer who wrote a book about hiking or local hiking trails.

The third tweet is an example of how writers can help each other. The fourth tweet is presumably by a writer encouraging other authors to attend a conference. The fifth tweet introduces readers to other Indie authors. The hashtags in this example help readers and self-described bibliophiles to find great books to read.

You can also tweet images, quotes from your books, videos, book trailers, Amazon reviews, and information about your colleagues’ books. GIFs are super popular as well because then tend to stop people as they peruse their newsfeeds.